More Than Living

Three reasons why the Tour De France is better than football

It might sound like a stupid ques­tion, but is cyc­ling better than foot­ball? I’ve been acci­dent­ally watch­ing the Tour De France this year and, per­son­ally, I’m find­ing it so much more excit­ing than fol­low­ing the Premiership.

I’m a Liv­er­pool fan, and have been ever since I was 10 and my older brother told me that Kenny Dalg­lish was god and that I must love him always. (There’s a whole other blog post about the grief this advice has caused me – I’m also a Brummie, and my brother con­ver­ted to fol­low­ing The Blues shortly after ignit­ing a love of Liv­er­pool in my own heart, leav­ing me stran­ded in that most des­pised of foot­ball cat­egor­ies, a non-​​native fan.) On and off, I’ve spent the last 26 years watch­ing the Mighty Reds win stuff and lose stuff. Some­times I’ve laughed, some­times I’ve cried. But in the last, what, 10 years, fol­low­ing a foot­ball club other than Man Utd, Arsenal and, lately, Chelsea, has been kind of predictable.

Not so “Le Tour”. First off, a Brit has been half decent in it – sprinter Mark Cav­endish, who must be pretty much a dead cert for a Gold in Beijing, man­aged to stick it out for a gruelling 14 days of the Tour and won four stages, smash­ing the pre­vi­ous record for a Brit­ish cyc­list. Second, it’s the closest race in living memory, with (at the time of writ­ing) only 55 seconds between the top four riders. But the best thing about it is the way the riders all seem to be made of some kind of bionic mater­ial. They ride and they ride and they ride over moun­tains on and on. And then, the next day, they get up and do it all over again. For three weeks. Some­times (in fact, lots of the time) they crash. They do bleed – so they def­in­itely aren’t robots – but they don’t seem to feel any pain. They just get back on their bikes and carry on riding. Com­pare and con­trast with your aver­age “modern slave” at a Premi­er­ship club. “Uncom­plain­ing” is not the word that comes to mind.

But the best bit of watch­ing this year’s Tour, for me, is the way it has rekindled my long-​​forgotten teen-​​love for Scot­tish cyc­ling hero Robert Millar. No, not David Millar (this year’s “great hope” for Bri­tain who is cur­rently lan­guish­ing in 105^th place), Robert Millar. Robert came fourth in the Tour in 1984 (the highest placed finish for a Brit ever) and won the “King of the Moun­tains” com­pet­i­tion that year. It was two years before Mexico ‘86 (when I fell hope­lessly in love with Gary Lineker, even though he played for Ever­ton – a pas­sion I’ve never got over), and the sight of Robert in his red-​​and-​​white spotty top, cyc­ling up some ridicu­lous moun­tain or another while Kraftwerk’s Tour De France played over and over in my head, remains one of my most endur­ing teen memories.

It was a sim­pler, more inno­cent time. I miss it. Still, at least I’ve got tonight’s ITV4 show to look for­ward to. And tomor­row … it’s Alpe D’Huez. There’s bound to be a bionic crash on that. Brilliant.

IMAGE by Flickr user J.C. Rojas

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​07-​​22 22:22:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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